Country people and places

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 17

Country people and places

Edward Thomas on the Countryside. Edited by Roland Gant. Faber and Faber. 183 pp. $12.05. (Reviewed by Anthony Holcrott) When Edward Thomas wrote his first poem in September, 1914. he already had 17 years of writing behind him. In that time he had published more than 20 books of essays and biography; yet today the fame of that last sheaf of poems overshadows everything else he wrote. This is a pity, for Thomas ranks with Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson as a sensitive observer of the English countryside. Like John Clare, he possessed a gift for describing what he saw on his walks with the freshness of an encounter; through his eyes we see a commonplace thing like a poppy or a gleam of frost among the woods as if for the first time. He is seldom mesmerised, as Jefferies too often is. by the minutiae of nature; his prose grows, rather, from what he himself described as “the loving contemplation of visible things.” Thomas is also a shrewd observer of country people, and has a brooding feeling for the history of the land and its legends. What, perhaps, is less satisfying about the essays, is their reticence. A distance remains between the selfexpression Thomas was to achieve in his poetry, and the sensitive observation of the essays. There is nothing in the present selection as self-revealing as Jefferies’ “The Story of My Heart,” unless it be in a short essay of 1911 entitled “The Stile,” where Thomas describes, very

beautifully, how an unspoken sense of communion between the two companions seems to merge, in the deepening twilight, with something greater than themselves. "I knew,” writes Thomas, “that I was more than the something which had been looking out all that day upon the visible earth and thinking and speaking and tasting friendship. Somewhere — close at hand in that rosy thicket or far off beyond the ribs of sunset — I was gathered up with an immortal company where 1 and poet and lover and flower and cloud and star were equals, as all the little leaves were equal ruflling before the gusts, or sleeping and carved out of the silentness . . . The confidence and ease had become a deep joy: I knew 1 could not do without the Infinite, nor the Infinite without me." In an earlier volume, published in 1948, Mr Gant made, a chronological selection of Edward Thomas's prose; this time he has chosen prose — and poems — to illustrate features of country life. The four sections of the book are headed “Roads and Footpaths,” “The Lie Of the Land.” “Figures in the Landscape,” and “Through the Year.” Mr Gant has been a life-long admirer of Thomas’s work, and his choise of both prose and verse leaves little to be desired. Nevertheless, a selection, however good, is not a substitute for the whole, and it is more than time that some of the best prose works were available again. “Light and Twilight,” from which the extract above is taken, would be a good beginning.